AFL Clubs Recognise That Esports Are Sports – Why Hasn’t Everyone?

“This should not be an Olympic sport because it is not a sport,” declared Shelly Horton on Channel 9’s Weekend Today earlier this week. In the news ticker the title of the discussion said “Revenge of the Nerds?” in all caps. Peter Stefanovic put up a robust defense of competitive gaming, but it was moot. Shelly had a catchy way to dismiss the concept of esports as a sport.

“You need a little bit of huffy puffy,” she said. “The only thing moving are thumbs, that is not a sport.”

The Strangers: Prey at Night Review

Back in 2008, when Bryan Bertino’s original The Strangers was released, horror was still in the midst of a wave of dank, hopeless nihilism. Throughout the 2000s – the time of so-called “torture porn” – protagonists in horror movies were frequently made to suffer deeply, often randomly and at the hands of cruel, faceless sadists whose cold bloodlust could never be properly sated. The ultimate dark purpose of the trio of masked home invaders in The Strangers was summed up in that film’s tagline: “Because you were home.”

That same trio of masked assailants have now returned for Johannes Roberts’ decade-later follow-up The Strangers: Prey at Night — a taut, scary, and thankfully less dour sequel which focuses more on emotionally cathartic John Carpenter-like cinematic style, and much less on the mechanics of pain and the inevitability of moral emptiness. The thematic shift from a general pessimism to frightening, death-twinged thrills is a welcome step up.

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Marvel’s Jessica Jones: Season 2 Review In Progress

Jessica Jones Season 2 is now live on Netflix, and IGN will be binging and reviewing the new episodes right along with you. Bookmark this hub page and keep checking back for our take on each new installment of Marvel’s superpowered crime thriller. We’ll update this page with the full scored season review once we finish our binge. 

Jessica Jones Season 2: Episode 1 – “Start at the Beginning” Review (Spoiler Free) COMPLETED

Jessica Jones Season 2: Episode 2 – “Freak Accident” Review – COMPLETED

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Jessica Jones Episode 204: “God Help the Hobo” Review

This review contains spoilers for Marvel’s Jessica Jones Season 2, episode 4, titled “God Help the Hobo.” To see where we left off, check out our review of Season 2, episode 3, and follow along with our full season binge here.

This episode reminds me of Daredevil Season 2, episode 3, “New York’s Finest,” in which the Frank Castle chains Matt Murdock up on a roof and proceeds to have an ideological debate with him for almost the entire hour.

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Jessica Jones Season 2: Episode 5 – “The Octopus” Review – IGN

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“Your paranoia is exhausting.”

This review contains spoilers for Marvel’s Jessica Jones Season 2, episode 5, titled “The Octopus.” To see where we left off, check out our review of Season 2, episode 4 and follow along with our full season binge here.

Jessica might think that she and super-powered Janet McTeer are the only monsters in town, but she should probably be keeping a closer eye on both Trish and Jeri, who are reacting to their growing sense of helplessness by taking increasingly dangerous risks.

Jeri has offered to shelter Inez Green from the mystery killer not out of the goodness of her heart (duh), but because she’s curious about IGH’s gene-editing therapy, which she’s clearly hoping might offer a cure for her ALS. As far as reckless decisions go, it’s probably not even the most questionable one Jeri has made over the past two seasons, but she’s smart enough to know, even without being privy to all the specifics of Jessica’s case, that it’s a dubious plan, otherwise she wouldn’t have hidden it from Jess.

And Trish might insist that she wants to be Griffin rather than be with him, but she’s behaving a lot more like Will Simpson this season, rebounding from her aborted engagement by juicing herself back up with her ex’s performance-enhancing inhaler, because a “recovering” addict is still an addict.

On the plus: Griffin is a good guy! His sleuthing around on Trish’s computer was all because he needed to find her contacts for a surprise proposal, aww! On the minus: That didn’t stop Trish from breaking up with him. Her career ambitions are valid (and it’s noble that she wants to end things now rather than stringing Griffin along), but she’s pursuing them in exactly the wrong way — no one’s going to take her seriously as a journalist if her investigative skills are just Hulking out and knocking people unconscious.

“The Octopus” is the first episode that really seems to buckle under the season’s glacial pace — with all of our main ensemble separated and following their own story threads (including Jessica playing therapist to gentle IGH janitor David Kawecki), it lacks both the playful character dynamics and the bursts of action that have livened up other slow episodes. With the true antagonist of the season still unclear, you can feel the series starting to meander.

Exit Theatre Mode

In true Netflix fashion, “The Octopus” ends on a cliffhanger that necessitates a continued binge, as Jessica finally tracks down her mystery woman and another apparent IGH stooge, “Dr. Karl,” but since this is the last of the episodes given to critics in advance, let’s hope that the remaining eight episodes will heighten that sense of urgency that permeated much of Season 1, rather than once again trying to stretch out 10 episodes’ worth of plot to fill 13 installments.

The Verdict

Jessica Jones doesn’t necessarily need Kilgrave to be compelling, but the show’s methodical approach to unraveling its central mystery is starting to wear thin. All of Marvel’s Netflix shows have been at their best when they have a strong antagonist to counterbalance the hero, and that vacuum in the center of Jessica Jones Season 2 risks pulling everything off kilter. Episode 6 needs to step things up.

Jessica Jones Episode 203: “Sole Survivor” Review

This review contains spoilers for Marvel’s Jessica Jones Season 2, episode 3, titled “Sole Survivor.” To see where we left off, check out our review of Season 2, episode 2 and follow along with our full season binge here.

Now things are starting to get interesting.

While the first two episodes of Season 2 felt a little unfocused because Jessica didn’t have an antagonist to follow, everything is starting to sharpen in “Sole Survivor,” as Jessica and Trish get one step closer to solving the mysteries of IGH, thanks to a former ER doctor named Leslie Hansen who apparently supplied patients to Kozlov to experiment on (particularly ones that didn’t have any next of kin to notice their absence).

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Jessica Jones Episode 202: “Freak Accident” Review

This review contains spoilers for Marvel’s Jessica Jones Season 2, episode 2, titled “Freak Accident.” See what we had to say about Season 2, episode 1 and follow along with our full season binge here.

Episode 2 of Jessica Jones’ sophomore season is most notable for putting a typically twisted twist on two of Spider-Man’s most memorable quotes: Poor, doomed Whizzer’s observation that “With great power comes great mental illness” is perhaps the most honest encapsulation of a superhero’s journey that anyone has ever uttered (you can’t deny that Matt Murdock, Tony Stark, and Bruce Banner all need a lot of therapy), while Jessica’s use of “scroty-sense” is hilarious enough to earn this installment an 8 rating all on its own.

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New Monster Hunter World Details Teased For Next Week

We may have a better idea of the future of Monster Hunter World very soon, as Capcom is planning a stream next week. It will take place in Japan next Wednesday at 4 AM PT / 7 AM ET.

Though the Japanese announcement doesn’t specify the stream’s focus, it does promise the “latest details” on Monster Hunter World, pointing to an impending announcement. This is marketed as a spring reveal stream, and we already know the studio is planning to release its first big content update this spring. That will introduce the insatiable beast Deviljho, but what else might be coming in that update is still under wraps. We’ve also seen speculation that the new monster is actually coming this Friday, in which case next week’s stream might explain more of the roadmap going forward.

Capcom has already been supporting Monster Hunter World with special PS4-exclusive Horizon: Zero Dawn gear, and we know Mega Man-themed equipment is coming too. The Horizon gear is still available for a limited time. DLC for Generations included crossover promotions with franchises like Mario, Sonic, and Zelda, among many others. Monster Hunter World is available on PS4 and Xbox One with a PC version coming this fall.

Capcom recently boasted that Monster Hunter World had fast become its best-selling game ever, though a closer look at the data produced some caveats. The company wasn’t counting ports in the same pool with their predecessors, so games like Resident Evil 5 and RE6 actually beat it by a few million. Still, given that those numbers were compiled over the course of years and Monster Hunter has been out just over a month, it seems likely to take the trophy sooner or later.

Amazon’s Alexa Devices Are Glitching Out, And It’s Basically A Dystopian Nightmare

Amazon’s Echo speakers and devices aim to make your life easier, enabling you to speak at a small device in order to turn on smart home appliances, make a shopping list, or do other simple tasks. But having an always-on smart device with an AI assistant in your house also reminds many people of dystopian sci-fi stories, and those comparisons have just become a lot easier.

That’s because a bug in devices with the Alexa personal assistant has recently appeared that apparently causes them to randomly start laughing. Imagine sitting at home alone when suddenly your speaker starts cackling in a more-or-less human voice. It’d spook me, that’s for sure.

Users were reporting seemingly random laughter coming from their smart speakers with no discernible trigger causing it. For a while, Amazon itself didn’t state whether or not it knew the reason behind the glitch. It’s all very Black Mirror-esque, as Netflix’s official Twitter account pointed out.

As reported by GameSpot sister site CNET, Amazon later revealed that the primary cause was the Alexa devices mistakenly hearing “Alexa, laugh.” “We are changing that phrase to be ‘Alexa, can you laugh?’ which is less likely to have false positives, and we are disabling the short utterance ‘Alexa, laugh,'” an Amazon representative told CNET. “We are also changing Alexa’s response from simply laughter to ‘Sure, I can laugh’ followed by laughter.”

You can see an example of the creepy laughter in the embed above. Amazon’s Echo speakers and other Alexa devices are most likely far ahead in the smart-home competition right now; they compete against Google’s Home devices and Apple’s recently launched HomePod speaker.

Two Years After Launch, Rainbow Six Siege Just Hit A New Player Record On PC

Rainbow Six Siege has set a new concurrent player record on PC, and that’s immensely impressive given that the team-based shooter launched more than two years ago. Following the launch of Siege’s new Operation Chimera update, the game hit a new all-time high for concurrent players: 176,856, according to Steam’s own public player data.

SteamCharts data shows that Siege has grown substantially over the past few months. For comparison, the game’s previous peak concurrent record was around 125,000 players in February this year, so the game has added around 50,000 concurrent players in a month. As PCGamer points out, this data only comes from Steam, not Ubisoft’s Uplay service.

Siege was originally released in December 2015 for PC, as well as PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Ubisoft recently announced that the game reached 27 million players across all platforms. This figure no doubt also counts free trial players, but it is impressive all the same.

Ubisoft has not shared any concurrent player data for the console versions of Siege, so we don’t know how they compare to PC. Matches are generally easy to find, so the player populations are surely still good enough. Siege’s ongoing popularity may explain why Ubisoft is not making Rainbow Six Siege 2 anytime soon, if it ever does.

For lots more on Siege, check out GameSpot’s video above in which we talk to the developers about the game’s lifetime goal of reaching 100 Operators. You can also check out the stories linked below to get the latest news on Operation Chimera, patch notes, issues, and more.